Beyond Synchronicity: Memories, Dreams, Remote Viewings

"Mixed blessing" is a term I have some trouble with. In my experience all blessings are mixed, in that they come with a price tag attached. It's the ebb and flow of the Universe.

You may not see it right off, but eventually you will. Call it Karma, call it Kismet, call it a kick in the eye, but nothing really comes for free in this world.

A few years back I was disturbed that I didn't seem to be dreaming anymore. What little dreaming I did remember seemed like a tape loop, an endless road trip on the highway to Boston, stopping in those strange little cities that pop up in the bleary-eyed New England nowhere. Hotels, motels, Holiday Inns; my dreaming life had become the Theatre of Disquiet.

Little did I realize that change would come in the form of my allegedly non-progressive chronic pain condition progressing several notches, quite probably in reaction to the science fiction levels of mold and tree pollen we've been seeing (4000+ pollen counts were not unusual this past spring, for instance). My doctor explained that whenever my immune system was challenged that would in turn aggravate the pain/fatigue process, the fatigue itself being aggravated by the medications.

So I began sleeping a lot more and more... I don't know, deeply? More dreamily? I've no idea how the process works.* But I did get my very rich and immersive dream world back.

At one hell of a price.

I used to keep a dream log but I don't bother anymore. It got to be too much and the dreams were pretty easy to figure, me being an old hand at it. I just live there, the same as I do in my waking life.

The difference is that my waking life is essentially static and routine and my dreaming life is panoramic, widescreen, Technicolor and psychedelic. I was once very possessive of it, and rely on it as a tool in my waking life. Don't ask me to explain.

I'm sure the several years of hypogogic meditation helped all of this, in that I broke down that brick wall that had grown up between my sleeping and waking minds. One particular example is that I seem to have dramatically expanded my library of exterior landscapes and interior settings for these dreams, something I am sure is a direct result of the meditation.

As I've written before, I've come to experience what can only be described as bursts of nonlocality in these meditations, moments of extraordinary clarity in which I am no longer lying in my bed but walking in strange rooms, or treading water in an ocean off the coast of a tropical island or sitting atop the ledge of a Manhattan skyscraper, what they used to call "astral projection," I suppose.

I'm not saying this is always a pleasant experience.

Now, one might reasonably argue that these are themselves fragments of dream reality breaking through to the conscious mind. If you haven't experienced it for yourself that is certainly a rational counterpoint and one I have no need to quibble with. You can't argue sex with a virgin.

Although this is based on entirely subjective data, I believe this is related to what the remote viewers (and certainly more serious meditation practitioners) experience and work with more reliably. Being a novice, I'm not controlling the experience but am getting glimpses of nonlocality as if channel-surfing- I just happen to tune into the remote channel now and again during this meditational practice.

So what does this has to do with Synchronicity as misdiagnosed psi? Well, pretty much everything. In moments that we dismissively ascribe to some abstract concept like Synchronicity, we are apparently tuning into the nonlocal, nonlinear channel during our absent-minded surfing, meaning the channel that stands outside both time and space.

Now, we have no idea what causes or drives all this. It would be helpful to find out what exactly is behind them but I have a very strong feeling we will never really understand what exactly triggers these moments. Stress, trauma, and other extreme states seem more likely to unleash these events but not reliably so. A happy, well-adjusted individual might well experience these events more often than your stereotypical doom-laden occultist. The fact is that we simply don't know.

So as it stands "Synchronicity" seems to be so random and patternless that it's essentially untestable and as such is dismissed by most of the scientific community, with the notable exception of your more intrepid quantum physicists. It seems forever perched at the edge of respectability but can never quite close the deal.

But everyone experiences it. And does so in a way that the skept-o-bilge that is designed to throw you off its scent comes across not only as weak and desperate but insulting and demeaning. The entire mechanism behind Synchronicity is meaning, not mere coincidence. Coincidences happen all the time. They are the latticework that underlies the whole of Creation.

It's why I have argued that people should concentrate only on those coincidences that are supercharged with meaning, so much so that they are nearly supernatural in their content. Those usually are the ones that lead to life changes, from the small and curious to the huge and profound.

Throw the rest back.

POSTSCRIPT: This is the part of the program now where I remind you that the most brilliant "Synchromystic" I ever knew ascribed all of this not to the impersonal forces of quanta, but to unimaginably evolved extraterrestrial entities who existed outside of all natural limits and used these symbolic-sync tricks for reasons altogether inscrutable.

* I was diagnosed with sleep apnea and was found to be lacking in slow wave sleep. But this usually means you are stuck in REM sleep instead, so you think I'd be dreaming like a champ. Now that the apnea issue has been addressed I am dreaming more vividly again so the exact science behind all this is a bit above my pay grade. I suppose I was experiencing fairly serious alpha sleep intrusion, which might account for the discrepancy.

26 comments:

I think gravimetric information can be superpositional, and that can kill early, or late, or just stay in the background.

Aliens? Get killed and entangled. Not for everyone, all at once. I think sometimes that the irony is when the monsters are just the heroes that let the mutations have what they will, and let the rest ride.

There used to be things that were done in culture.Now, it is like everything has to make up whatever and whenever, and not get caught.

Here's a weird thing I noticed that might be completely useless, but I feel its worth mentioning. I have a close female friend who I care about deeply, and I've noticed that she seems to have now been 'initiated' into my own personal world of synch and PSI to the point where she brings up the subject on her own or notices strange patterns in her own life that are related to me. She finds this curious and a little frightening - as if I'm now somehow at the centre of her spiritual reality, an interloper in her own private interior domain.

What I've tried to outline to her in various ways is that my presence is only reflecting or refracting her own meaningful stuff back at her BECAUSE of our connection. I'm just a mirror, an avatar for her interior self. I can see this clearly, in much the same way as how I can now see how the same thing happened to me with 'mentors' or other important people in my life. My connection with them allowed them into my domain, but it was really all abut me and my perception. They were just the ways to convey the esoteric nature of these meaningful occurrences. We're all at the centre of our own universes. This is not solipsistic, or ego masquerading as spirit. It's just the way consciousness or whatever operates. Magicians know this. Artists know this. I wish scientists knew this too, en masse. It might mean we actually get some valuable work done, instead of pissing in someone else's cornflakes because we want to call them out on their lack of intellectual sobriety. When really we're defending ill-held beliefs and the lack of data, not data itself.

Well, the truly rare magic comes when you can merge those autonomous zones and step between them. It seems like a tough order in the Selfie Age. I wonder if individualism hasn't just morphed into atomism while we weren't paying attention. The problem becomes isolation, a constellation of emotional islands lost in contact with one another. Occupational hazard these days.

Raj, I have the same type of synchronistic connection with a very close friend of mine. She herself is very powerful and has mentored me on the stages and our ability to direct beyond the veil and have conversations with energy entities (such as we all are) on a basis that we control. This being done as I sleep. The more I am coming into that ability, the more I am able to influence beyond this physical realm in waking state. And the parallels we experience, her and I, in our lives, could be construed as frightening or disquieting, if I didn't "feel" the power we both have. Interesting, as Chris says, to be able to be cognizant of those events in waking life that are interconnected with our sleep state. I used to have difficulty in discerning what I was experiencing at a particular moment between what I felt was from a "dream experience" to that of a physical reality: deja vu. Now, not so much anymore, as I have been shown where and how to be able to tell the difference and what the experience actually means. Fascinating !

I did inadvertently catch something's attention for a few weeks recently --my own damned fault-- that resulted in some interesting interactions, and at least one spooky real-world effect (my analog wristwatch, battery just replaced 4mo ago, lost 20 mins one night as I slept.. yet hasn't lost any time since, wearing it as I type this). Perhaps a gentle reminder that yep, we're out here, too?

We can't even determine if these things come from outside us, or from within. Much less what to call or name them. Even less what they could be. They don't appear interested in exchanging information, or communicating in any meaningful (to humans) way. If anything, they give off a Trickster vibe and probably shouldn't really be trusted...

In any case, I agree that "it" (synchronicity, psi, The Winking Universe, little grey men made out of quantum dreamstuff, who the f--k knows?), definitely does exist. But I'm not so sure that "it" (or "they"?) much care what words we use to describe them, or their effects.

If anything, it/they seem(s) to prefer that we quasi-sentient meatbags never get to find out for certain.

I'm actually highly leery of lucid dreaming, to be honest. To me the entire point of dreaming is to bypass the conscious mind and let the deeper contents of the unconscious drive the train. I simply don't have faith in the mechanism of lucid dreaming as a means to overcome the power of conscious attention. It seems to me to be a kind of guided imagination in the light trance state than a true dream state. I admit I could be wrong but having the experience with hypnogogia (I was up until 4:30 AM this morning doing my meditations) I see the power the unconscious has to overwhelm the conscious mind and that's not even a true sleep state. I don't mean to dispute anyone's experiences with LD but I would ask you to question whether or not what you are experiencing is a true REM state or something else, which is not to say that something else is not useful, mind you. Everyone is different. I suppose my caution is abetted by 30 years of New Age hype and the obvious hoaxers like that LA-based LD cult we heard about a couple years ago. Again, if it works for you go for it, but I'm not really sure of its efficacy. And not for lack of trying.

Have been reading Ingo Swann’s Penetration… and at the same time found myself looking @ the Varginha case. You mention in the comments to your Technocrats and Trojan Horses post that Vallee did a presentation @ Esalen in 2009. Have to admit the case is on one level hard to swallow but though it has been called a hoax … it is involved and not what would seem to be a ‘straightforward’ hoax… well by ‘hard to swallow’ really all I mean is even by ‘ufo’ standards… pretty weird…

But reading your Techno Trojan post I was quite struck by your observations- I really want to use the word trenchant- but so much of your stuff indeed has a profoundness to it I am often amazed at your ability to stay on target and yet get behind it… well that is a peculiar phrase. But I like it. Chris you have an unusual and unique… and penetrating voice… the posts re synchronicity again have this penetrating quality...

Penetration is one of those books… well Ingo wasn’t exactly Melville but he does get his point across. His comments about our Moon, telepathy and universal consciousness are really pretty interesting… the book is amazing and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it…

But his observation of the ‘pyramid’ is quite incredible:

"Well, it must be some kind of 'space displacer', but really Axel, I haven't a clue. But I CAN understand why people who see something like this don't believe it--and why people who haven't seen it CAN'T believe it." [p. 96]

Axel was silent, staring out the window. I went on: "As I remember it, the thing did not 'transport' itself. It GREW in place right where it appeared. "It was a pyramidal thing, not a saucer. We think of a saucer flying about, and in fact when we think of things in the air we think of flying in the air. "We do not think of things growing in place in the air." [ p. 97]

This comment, though from his book, I have lifted from the waterufo.net site… Ingo watched the ‘pyramid’ sucking up water… of course we can speculate how long such ‘pyramids’ have been growing and disappearing...

It obviously seemed more like an ‘apport’ than a ‘ship’… and what does all of that have to do with synchronicity… Ingo covered it pretty well in Penetration. Of course I immediately think of Stargate and the pyramids… and their true origins and inspiration… well apports and space travel... thats blurring the lines right there...

Universal Consciousness would comfortably take in these points of view... In the book a rather secretive group- whose nature is never illuminated- pays Ingo to remote view the Moon. And he sees someone there… but the curious thing is though he is simply remote viewing they seem to have an awareness of his viewing… their ‘telepathic’ abilities seem ‘beyond human’…

Ingo was on a totally other plane than the rest of us. He had perceptions that we probably had no concept of, never mind experience with. The proof of the pudding in this case was in his track record at SRI, which was duly noted. Makes you wonder, in the true sense of the word.

I've found most books that claim to explain the meaning of dreams of little use and spent most of my life knowing they did not explain much at all. I had a dream a few years ago where I was in a pool/snooker hall with some characters from Sesame Street. I was playing pool with Big Bird when all of a sudden the characters all pulled their false heads off and low and behold they were my work colleagues. They all started shouting at me telling me to wake up and when I did it just so happened to be two minuets before my alarm was due to go off. I've often had dreams that have involved me being woken two minuets before my alarm was set for, sometimes I've just recalled a whisper saying to wake up. Then I've had other more meaningful (synchronistic I supose) dreams that have only made sense two weeks or two years later and the timing seems to depend on how big an impact the event I find they relate to has on me emotionally or people I know. I think what you said about how getting a lot of sleep can effect dream time is so true. Some of the most clearest and most interesting dreams I've had occurred when I've woken up and then gone back to bed and/or not been sleep deprived.

Yeah, I hear you. Maybe it's a worldwide thing, the Collective Unconscious trying to undo some of the damage done out there by restoring the world's dreamtime. The Syncs are just the receipts that you get as proof of purchase. Maybe that's a hopeful thing.

I've found dreams and syncs can both be abstract and do both seem to connect to the collective unconscious at times. I think orchestrated events and just life in general can bring about certain types of syncs but then I've had days where I've been serenaded with syncs mostly very meaningful dream like ones that are impossible not to notice. I'm still not sure what to make of it all, which is one of the reasons why I love and appreciate what you do. Inter-dimensional beings messing with us is and interesting perspective, although it would appear to be the same place things such as omens and oracles and spiritual growth come from so I'm not too concerned by that thought.

I think the only real value I've read about in the LD category came from a man who'd suffered night terrors well into his forties. A therapist recommended he become lucid in whatever manner he could in order to turn on his horrific intruders to ask why they were chasing him, what they wanted. He eventually managed to do this and the intruder(s) froze in place, looked confused and left. He stopped having night terrors after that instance.

Seemed to me that it's a good practice in one's waking life, to ask ourselves what we fear and to peel that onion until the more inconvenient answers eventually emerge. Maybe the subconscious provides the impetus to do just that. When I have truly perplexing events going on, I often look to dreaming to answers that will help. It doesn't happen very often, but when help does come, the dreams are BIG in that I'm aware of their import inside the dreams. I'm in a fantastic liminal space of focus, but I'm not lucid per se. Every answer I've ever received had to do with trusting my intuition so I don't have many questions for my dreamer anymore.

Penetration by Swann can be downloaded free now. If I remember correctly, he gave someone permission to offer it because he didn't want to reprint again.

Another of his books whose title escapes me right now is even wyrder than Penetration. After meditating in a special room at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, a room designed to take him far deeper into consciousness, he began to see auras so large and beautiful, many of which had to do with a sexual nature, and they became so pervasive he had to have friends help him cross a street and get by in a world awash. All lines were blurred with colorful, active display. He said it took roughly two years to overcome the effects. Much as I've enjoyed reading about his wild adventures, I don't envy the guy.

Well, I just get hung on the fact that lucid and dreaming are antonyms, you dig? That's a big thing with me. You either submit to the other mind or you don't. I just don't know if there's a true interface. But again, your results may vary.

Hello peeps, I enjoyed this post. Synchronicity 'seems' patternless - but it is meaningful - something meaningful cannot be random or patternless, when you think about it ;) Even Finnegan's Wake can be sort of understood, but it requires effort. We will discern the patterns in synchronicity with effort and due diligence. Also, synchronicity is dreaming out loud. "The Lighthouse, the rock and the restaurant all fit the doubloon!" "It's a crystal. Nothing more. But if you turn it this way and look into it, it will show you your dreams."

So this is where the rub is - looking at things with the right paradigm reveals the pattern.

“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude...” ― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Ingo was on a totally other plane than the rest of us. He had perceptions that we probably had no concept of, never mind experience with. The proof of the pudding in this case was in his track record at SRI, which was duly noted. Makes you wonder, in the true sense of the word.”

Well your comment is without doubt quite true… His site is still out there of course and it has quite a lot of interesting material not the least of which are the pictures… but I found this remark by him in an essay on telepathy and the comment provokes several … well I find my mind wandering down several different paths after reading it…

Ingo was quite astute, and after some consideration of the idea of ‘secrecy’ he launches into some interesting comments about the roots of telepathy- something I believe he had devoted much thought to…

““ Honey,” she replied, “types like those try to act as if they are big shits on silver platters, but they are only small turds on tin plates. They always cheat and make trouble, and always disappear before paying up what is owed.”“ But how do you know that in advance?” I asked.“ You can feel it crawling on your skin, and smell it in your nose – it’s not a smell-smell, of course, but it’s a smell anyway.”

This author (Ingo) has remembered this small but rather stunning discussion ever since.”

Ingo likens it to a kind of sympathy and empathy as well as the sense of smell… and he includes this re another ‘clarivoyant’ whose efforts he witnessed on behalf of the police…

““I can’t get the bloody brutal thoughts of the killers and pictures out of my head - especially the sawing off part, the smell of the bone, blood, the agony of the guy, my skin again and again crawls with his fear and pain. God Damn! I can hardly sleep, every time I close my eyes there’s that FOOT dangling. Even drink doesn’t help. I’ve had to get pills.”About two weeks later, “Well, I’m a bit better now, but let the cops train their own clairvoyants, and let them be forensic specialists who are used to this kind of shit.”So, that was the end of BoBo’s clairvoyant detecting – after only three tries at it.”

Only two observations: first that telepathy is not what we think it is and the desire for secrecy may undercut its operation; I guess that is two… so the third would be it seems to run in the family. Does DNA have its hands in this… I suspect it does.

My apologies... but I found this comment by Hella Hammid re her RV experience and it dovetails with my above comment... its lifted from DojoPsi forum...

"Since the subjective experience of a remote viewer is most useful for us, I am looking for a range of viewer accounts. This account is notable for it's refreshing absence of relying on scribblograms. Here is how Hella Hammid describes her experience in the book Mind Race:

Although it is good to relax in a quiet place when doing remote viewing, my first experience took place while standing in a cold drizzle on a rather cold, windy roof of an SRI building. The "signal" came in so clearly:a red barn-type structure, wooden slats painted red running horizontally with a very steep pitched roof- then came other "signals" not of a visual nature.I felt it was a nonfunctioning building-a fake, or perhaps a stage set. No one living in it. The feeling became stronger, the emptiness more obvious. When I was taken to the site for feedback I was confronted by "The Little Red Schoolhouse" on a miniature golf course. Somewhat unnerved, I went home to remain incommunicado from the experimenters, Russ and Hal, for several weeks. I was scared and had to sort out this totally new experience. Yet, as skeptical as I might have been, it had happened to me and I was going to find out more about it.What I have learned so far, and am still learning each time I do this, is that the "signal" is always there and that my ability to access it depends on many conditions within me. Outer conditions are really secondary; I have done much work under less than "ideal" circumstances, such as a five-"man" submarine, submerged to a depth of five hundred feet under the ocean; or under a hot Egyptian sun for hours, describing artifacts that had not yet been excavated.What happens? Primarily I must listen in-warily. Not to think, but to be and allow images and sensations to appear seemingly out of left field and to grab them quietly by the tail, because they flash by in a millisecond. I do not try to look at anything, only record it. It will appear again and again with a new bit of information which is not necessarily visual, but may be of a great variety of other sensations: temperature, smells, sounds, emotional reactions such as "I am very uncomfortable here-want to get out" or "It is very dark, damp, busy, noisy, deserted, dusty," ect.To distinguish between signal and noise there are a number of fairly reliable checks. Most important is "It reminds me of..."-that's noise, which can easily fall off into wonderful meandering descriptions fraught with pieces of memories and associations. When this occurs I start from scratch and catch the signal anew. If it has persisted, it usually is the signal and not noise. Once I feel firmly established psychically at the site, it then becomes relatively easy to "move around" in it-either spatially or temporally-and "see" additional features just by "looking" at what is there.A little game I often play upon awakening, before opening my eyes, is to "look at the clock"- then open my eyes and presto!- instant feedback. Works well. Try it. Or to look at a friend's house just before telephoning to see if they are there. Trusting this gift and, most importantly, working with a supportive group of collaborators go a long way to enhancing one's ability to function psychically."

Thanks for this post Christopher there are a handful of passages which perfectly summed up my feelings but I was never able to articulate to myself or others about this whole interwoven coincidence/synchronicity/lucid dreaming world which i am part of, and I can completely relate to the comment by knocker above where I had the same problem and got cured except in lieu of a therapist I self medicated.

I had a sleep study for suspected apnea, but that didn't register. However, my "sleep architecture" was abnormal, and I stayed over the next day for Multiple Sleep Latency [MLT] Tests (how quickly you can fall asleep) and Maintenance of Wakefulness tests [MW] (the opposite, in the simplest terms). I was diagnosed with narcolepsy. I do not have cataplexy.

I too have described my nighttime sleep as "channel surfing," and I do the same thing during naps: close to immediately go into dream sleep. It doesn't matter how much sleep I get because my sleep is not restful; in fact, I'd say my brain is at least and sometimes more engaged when dreaming than it is awake. It is like I am the writer, producer, director, set designer, actor, etc. Full color, complete sentences. The way people behave in my dreams has often spilled over into my relationships with them during my waking life. Often I am aware I am dreaming, so perhaps this qualifies as lucid dreaming, and sometimes I can pursue a more pleasant line than an alternative during a dream (let's stick with this character) but it is more like watching a movie and thinking, here I am, watching a movie.

So am I then dreaming that I am dreaming?

I thought this was how everyone dreamed, but have been told that most people don't remember their dreams, and so when they speak of them are talking about the exceptional times that they do. I've had a lot of procedures involving propofol, and when I told the doctor how I hated being nagged out of it, she said, that that was probably the closest I get to restful sleep.

Usually my dreams involve impossible tasks and are even more vivid and frustrating during times of stress.

Amphetamines (or provigil) can take care of the daytime sleepiness, but adjusting sleep architecture hasn't progressed in the 20 years since I was diagnosed. I've taken neurotontin "to consolidate dream sleep," and recently ambien and remeron (both at same tim). I suppose they have come the closest to making my sleep normal, but the thing is, I wake up now aware that I have been dreaming but can't remember the dreams clearly, and after so many years of the dreaming being part of my life in the mind, I feel alienated from part of myself.

The only thing left in the goodie bag, and my doctor wants to pursue this, although it is issued by only one pharmacy for the nation, is Xyrem (GHB ).

Did you have the MWT and MSL tests? I'm interested too in your doctor's linking the return of dreaming to an immune reaction. Current thinking is that narcolepsy is an autoimmune disease, and autoimmune diseases in one body system are linked to more likelihood of autoimmune response in other systems. (I, for example, have primary biliary cholangitis [citthosis].)

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